The
anniversary provides an ideal opportunity to look at the
United States’ record in preventing genocide around the
world. That record is dismal.

Why?

The
most frequent explanations for America’s failure to prevent
genocide concern a lack of national interest or political
will. Both have indeed been influential. But a more honest
account would acknowledge the United States’ own complicity
in backing genocidal regimes.

It’s
time for the United States to examine how its own foreign
policy promotes genocide, and take the actions necessary to
curb it. These include making clear assessments of when
genocide is occurring or about to occur — regardless of
whether it is perpetrated by its friends or foes — and
granting jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice
(ICJ), the body
designated by the resolution to hear “disputes between
the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation,
application, or fulfillment of the present Convention,
including those relating to the responsibility of a State
for genocide.”

The
convention defines genocide as actions taken with the
“intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial, or religious group.” In contrast to the
designation of “crimes against humanity,” which were at that
time understood to happen only during war, the convention
broke new ground in noting that genocide can also occur in
peacetime — thus opening a broader set of acts of violence
to international condemnation. The convention identified
genocide as a crime under international law, outlined the
specific criminal acts that constituted it, and called for
cooperation among ratifying nations to stop it.

Eventually, cases for the Genocide Convention came to be
tried before the ICJ in The Hague, Netherlands.

The
United States became a signatory to this convention in 1948,
but resisted passing the
legislation to implement it until 1988. Moreover, the
United States is one of only five parties to the Genocide
Convention that
refuse to recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ.
Although it had signed on 40 years earlier, the United
States withdrew its agreement to compulsory jurisdiction by
the ICJ in 1986, when Nicaragua brought a case against the
United States for sponsoring an insurrection against the
Nicaraguan government. The United States’ lack of
participation in the full authority of the ICJ directly
diminishes the court’s ability to hold states accountable
for violations of international laws and norms, and
diminishes the world’s ability to prevent genocide.

National Interest and Political Will

Two
main reasons have been given for the United States’ failure
to prevent genocide: national interest and political will.

Although awash in lofty rhetoric about human rights and
democracy, the United States often pursues what it sees as
its own best interest. Frequently this amounts to a
calculation based on its relations with individual members
of the international community: When enemy states commit
massacres, the United States responds with condemnation,
sanctions, and possibly military intervention. In contrast,
when the perpetrator of serious human rights violations is a
U.S. client state, the United States remains silent — or, at
most, issues an occasional rhetorical condemnation.

The “political
will” narrative suggests that the country’s heart is in
the right place but that policymakers are prevented by
domestic political considerations from taking the necessary
action to stop genocide. In their 2008 report on the
occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Genocide
Convention, “Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S.
Policymakers,”
Madeleine Albright and William Cohen made this argument
forcefully, repeatedly calling for improved leadership and
political will.

But
the story of America’s relationship with genocide is far
more than a case of purposeful negligence. The United States
has had close ties with numerous genocidal regimes, despite
being a signatory to the Genocide Convention.

Selective Outrage and Complicity

Years
of massacres around the world demonstrate Washington’s
selective outrage: condemnation of certain atrocities and
silence or complicity toward others.

One of
the most famous cases of the United States remaining silent
occurred in 1971. On March 25, the regime based in West
Pakistan launched
“Operation Searchlight,” which initiated its genocide
against Bengalis in East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh).
Acting with the courage to challenge his own government,
Arthur Blood, at the time the U.S. general consul in Dhaka,
sent what came to be known as the “Blood
Telegram.” In it, he and others criticized the U.S.
government for failing to denounce Pakistan’s “genocide” and
for choosing “not to intervene, even morally.”

This
silence in the face of massacre can be explained by
geopolitics. At the time, the United States and China were
using Pakistan as an intermediary in their attempt to open
and improve Sino-American relations. Despite Blood’s
passionate insistence that genocide was taking place, the
Nixon administration refused to use the word “genocide” to
describe the atrocities. Doing so would have implied an
obligation to intervene under the Genocide Convention and
undermined the administration’s geopolitical goals.

Halfway around the world and a decade later, the United
States not only fell silent, but actively supported a
government while it was committing genocide. Following
Efrain Rios Montt’s military coup in March 1982, the
Guatemalan army massacred indigenous Mayan villagers deemed
sympathetic towards leftist rebels. The suppression of
left-wing activity fit squarely with U.S. goals during the
Cold War. When the Commission for Historical Clarification
presented its final report,
Guatemala: Memory of Silence, in 1999, it found
that 83 percent of the victims had been Mayan and concluded
that “agents of the state committed acts of genocide against
groups of Mayan people.”

The
Reagan administration had been no passive bystander in this
crime. During Rios Montt’s
recent trial on charges of genocide, award-winning
journalist
Allan Nairn reminded us that “U.S. military attachés in
Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the
G2 military intelligence unit, [and] the policy-making
officials back in Washington…were direct accessories to and
accomplices to the Guatemalan military. They were supplying
money, weapons, political support, intelligence.” Far from
standing silently by, the United States directly supported
those committing the atrocities in order to achieve its own
Cold War goals.

A mere
six years later, the Reagan administration once again gave
support to a genocidal regime—this time Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq. Despite the fact that Washington had facilitated arms
transfers to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan
administration did not want Iraq to lose in its war with
Iran, which raged throughout the 1980s and claimed over a
million lives. Despite
knowing full well that the Iraqi leader had used
chemical weapons to commit genocide against Iraq’s Kurdish
population, U.S. government officials continued to support
Hussein. According to journalist
Mike Shuster, in the 1980s the United States “play[ed] a
key role in all of [Hussein’s] actions, military and
political.” Hussein, according to Shuster, “was meeting with
senior U.S. diplomats. They were looking the other way when
he was using chemical weapons and developing other
unconventional weapons. He couldn’t have helped but to think
that the United States was behind him.” And so once again,
geopolitical considerations led the United States to back a
dictator engaged in genocide.

Over
two decades later, the Obama administration has similarly
maintained relations with genocidal regimes. In 2010, a
leaked UN report alleged that Rwanda, under current
president Paul Kagame, may have committed a reprisal
genocide against ethnic Hutus who had taken refuge in the
neighboring DRC. More recently, Rwanda has been accused of
having direct control over the Congolese
M23 rebel group, which UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights
Navy Pillay called “among the worst perpetrators of
human rights violations in the DRC, or in the world.” But
Paul Kagame has maintained close relations with the United
States ever since the 1994 genocide, and Rwanda remains a
strategic ally for the United States in central Africa.

A
similar drama may be unfolding in Myanmar, where Muslim
Rohingya villagers have been denied their right to
citizenship and targeted by Buddhist mobs and sympathetic
security forces as part of a campaign to ethnically cleanse
Myanmar of its Rohingya population. According to
Human Rights Watch, “An ethnic Arakanese campaign of
violence and abuses since June 2012 facilitated by and at
times involving state security forces and government
officials has displaced more than 125,000 Rohingya and Kaman
Muslims in western Burma’s Arakan State. Tens of thousands
of Rohingya still lack adequate humanitarian aid – leading
to an unknown number of preventable deaths – in isolated,
squalid displacement camps.”

The
systematic nature of these abuses — and the involvement of
Myanmar officials — constitutes crimes against humanity as
defined by the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Further, if the intent behind the policy of isolating
Rohingya in camps and denying them access to humanitarian
aid is their eventual death, Myanmar’s crimes could elevate
to genocide under Article 2 of the
Genocide Convention, which includes “deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Ahamed Jarmal,
Secretary General of the Burmese Rohingya Organization,
recently warned that “the situation is getting really
desperate. Mobs have attacked our villages, driving us from
our homes, children have been hacked to death, and hundreds
of my people have been killed by members of the majority.
Thugs are distributing leaflets threatening to ‘wipe us out’
and children in schools are being taught that the Rohingya
are different.” Yet
minor democratic reforms and the release of some
political prisoners were rewarded with the lifting of
sanctions and visits to Myanmar by then Secretary of State
Clinton, as well as President Obama. More recently,
President Obama welcomed Myanmar president Thein Sein to the
United States.

In
November 2012, prior to President Obama’s visit to Myanmar,
U.S. Ambassador to the UN
Samantha Power wrote glowingly of the Obama
administration’s support for human rights in Myanmar and the
reforms already underway. Yet Power also tempered the
praise, warning that “We are clear-eyed about the challenges
that Burma faces. The peril faced by the stateless Rohingya
population in Rakhine State is particularly urgent, and we
have joined the international community in expressing deep
concern about recent violence that has left hundreds dead,
displaced over 110,000, and destroyed thousands of homes.”

More
than a year later, conditions for the Rohingya have
worsened. Yet U.S. policy stays the course, a classic
exemplification of the foreign policy of selective outrage.
Myanmar is committing crimes against humanity, yet is
rewarded with the lifting of sanctions and presidential
visits. The good treatment is no wonder: resource-rich
Myanmar holds economic opportunities for the United States
and is strategically located on China’s southwestern border.

The
United States does not have a policy of disengagement when
it comes to the prevention of genocide. Rather, U.S. policy
is far worse: it operates on a principle of direct
engagement with — and sometimes support of — genocidal
regimes when Washington’s geopolitical goals demand it.

Prevention

The
Genocide Convention requires not only that perpetrators of
genocide be held to account, but also that countries prevent
genocide from occurring in the first place.

In
2007, the ICJ ruled in the case of Bosnia v. Serbia
that Serbia failed to fulfill its obligation under the
Genocide Convention to prevent genocide. According to the
ICJ, “In view of their undeniable influence,” the
Yugoslav federal authorities should “have made the best
efforts within their power to try and prevent the tragic
events then taking shape, whose scale, though it could not
have been foreseen with certainty, might at least have been
surmised.” The ICJ ruled that Serbia had the necessary
influence over the Bosnian Serbs to at least attempt to use
that influence to deter the Bosnian Serbs from committing
genocide against Bosnian Muslims.

What
about the United States? Did it wield the necessary
influence over the Pakistani, Guatemalan, and Iraqi
governments to have failed to fulfill its own obligation to
prevent genocide? Does the Obama administration hold the
necessary influence in Rwanda and Myanmar today?

Vera
Saeedpour, the late Kurdish specialist, once lamented that
“Until the priorities of the international community are
reordered to place human life in a loftier position, I fear
that our efforts will be largely relegated to recording
atrocities in history books.” The universal eradication of
genocide and other mass atrocity crimes requires a
revolutionary change in philosophy ¾ one that elevates human
life above the national interest.

A good
first step would be to redefine protecting human life as a
national interest. President Barack Obama intimated as much
two years ago when he presented his “Presidential
Study Directive on Mass Atrocities.” He said at the
time, “Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core
national security interest and a core moral responsibility
of the United States. Our security is affected when masses
of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders,
and murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and
livelihoods. America’s reputation suffers, and our ability
to bring about change is constrained, when we are perceived
as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide.”

Obama
went on to create an “interagency Atrocities Prevention
Board” to “coordinate a whole of government approach to
preventing mass atrocities and genocide.” Human rights
groups have generally welcomed this development, but have
recommended that the administration publicly state what
the comprehensive strategy for preventing atrocities is,
improve transparency, consult with civil society groups and
Congress, coordinate its efforts internationally, address
actual emergencies in the world, and make sure the board has
the resources to be effective.

But
the problems go much deeper. To have true effect, such a
task force would need to recognize when genocide has been
— or is about to be — perpetrated by countries the United
States considers allies. Even further, it would need to take
seriously the United States’ own complicity in genocide —
and commit to preventing it by transforming U.S. foreign
policy.

Nothing can excuse the outrageous failure to prevent
genocide. The United States needs to stop selectively
condemning countries only when it is in its own supposed
interest to do so. It needs to create a uniform standard for
condemning human rights violations. And it needs to
recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ, as well as the
International Criminal Court. If that means taking
responsibility — and risk — for being held to account for
its own violations of human rights, then all the better.

Jeff Bachmann is a professorial lecturer in Human Rights and
Co-Director of Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs at the
School of International Service at American University.

We ask readers to play a proactive role and click
the "Report link [at the base of each comment] when
in your opinion, comments cross the line and become
purely offensive, racist or disrespectful to others.

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)